Occam's Razor's Edge is an attempt to make sense of a world gone mad. I do not strive to leave a perfect world only one better than I found.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Hey kids,

Since the issue seems to be heating a bit since I last posted anything on it, I though I might elaborate a bit on this intelligent design mess.

One of the big intellectual problems it has it makes some huge assumptions. It assumes since some things are complex that there is no way that they could have occurred by chance. Let’s see the Universe is about 15 billion years old. No time for any complex systems like galaxies and DNA to develop. Everything in the Universe has at least some level of complexity. That’s because it’ had time on it’s side. 15 billion years is an awful lot of time and a lot of wonderful things can happen over that kind of time.

Just because something is unlikely to happen doesn’t make it impossible. It’s been said that nothing is too wonderful to be true I tend to agree.

I saw Monica Crowley tow the party line of “science class should teach all possible alternatives” on her little MSNBC show today. Ms. Crowley obviously is not well read in the sciences. Teaching possible alternative theories in science would mean high school science class would take about 50 years to complete. There’s an alternative to everything from the Big Bang to the extinction of the dinosaurs to why the sky is blue. I kid you not. If you’re going to teach one alternative shouldn’t you teach them all?

You see the intelligent design supporters don’t really give a damn about science class as a whole. They just want to get intelligent design into science class since there’s no chance of creationism getting into public schools. So they dressed up an old philosophical argument for this existence of God. Notice how there is a “creator” now not God. See they’re hiding behind the veil of universalism. I’m not buying it. So if a kid asks their teacher who the creator was and the teacher says, “Well it could have been God, Odin, Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster ”. Is that going to be all right?